The Crime Lords

Chapter 17- Wrath of the shadows

By then, I could feel my body again. I stood up and took a gun from my belt. Estella saw the moment and slowly moved to the opposite side of our opponent, raising a quill above her shoulder. Black Jack looked frantically between the two of us with a wild expression. I held my guard, not knowing when he would strike. Eventually, he lunged at me with lightning speed and knocked the gun from my hand with his staff before I could react. He then tried to poke me but I leaned back to dodge the staff and while balancing on one leg I kicked him in the face with the other. In the distraction, Estella took Black Jack's staff from his hands and used it to knock him out before he could recover. Black Jack wobbled a little bit before falling over on top of Catgirl, defeated.

"Woohoo!" I cheered. "That went well!"

Estella laughed and came over to hug me. "I'm sorry for not acting sooner, I could've saved you from being electrocuted."

"Hey." I said, hugging her back. "It's not your fault. Neither of us could've reacted as quickly as he can, but we still beat him, right?"

She released me and looked down on our previous opponents. "Yeah, we did. That's the most intense thing I've ever done."

I chuckled. "I've had worse, but for your first time against two assassins, you did really well."

"Thank you." She said, her face turning red at the cheeks. "Now let's help Joel."

We rushed to his side and quickly searched for the source of the bleeding. Estella found it first, and I'm glad she did, I would've lost my lunch. The source was a shard of wood sticking straight out of his thigh. It went all the way through too. That's when I noticed the many shards of wood and string surrounding Joel on the floor and I gasped in shock. Joel's bow had shattered in Shadow Knight's blast and the biggest shard had stabbed him in the leg.

I didn't know what to do. All I knew was that we needed to get Joel
back to HQ so Kira could tend to the wound. Surely she had some sort of cream or powder that could heal it.

"You stay here." Estella said quickly. "I'll check on the girls."

She ran off toward the two unconscious figures on the other side of the room, making sure to stay well away from the duel of the bosses. Which, fortunately, was going in MadMex's favour. Shadow Knight had used up most of his power and was now simply blocking his opponents fierce attacks. Joel moaned loudly which scared the living daylights out of me and rolled over to touch the shard in his leg.

"Is it bad?" He asked, still half conscious.

I nodded. "I'm not gonna lie, it's bad. You'll need Toxic and MadMex to check it out when we get back."

It was almost as if he had no idea that he was in the middle of a battle. He shot up to a sitting position and scanned the room with panicked eyes. "Is everyone ok? What did I miss?"

I explained the blast, the girls' undetermined injuries and the battle with Black Jack and Catgirl.

"Glad to know that bitch has been given what she deserves." Joel chuckled when he heard that news.

I bowed my head. "You're welcome."

Suddenly, the lights in the room shut off and the only source left was a red glow across the room. It was a little disturbing to realise that the glow was emanating from Shadow Knight's eyes. MadMex acted quickly, lashing out at Shadow Knight with a knife but he dodged it and shoved Wills aside. Then he sprinted over to his defeated teammates and picked them both up.

"You may have one this time, Crime Lords." He shouted in a booming voice that echoed off the walls like a bass drum. "But there will come a day when darkness fills your lungs and drags you down into hell. I will make sure of it, mark my words!"

Then the whole room erupted in the same bright red light as before for a second or two and all three samurai vanished completely. The lights flickered back on and I was standing in a circle with my team in the centre of the room. We all looked around at each other, confused.

"I don't know what just happened," Joel said, "but I'm bleeding to death, so..."

Wills scooped him up in his arms like a damsel in distress and started jogging toward the exit. "Team, head back to base. Mission complete!"

Mission complete. Those words echoed in my mind all the way back through the bush. We had won the day. We beat the samurai, something I didn't think was possible! I could've felt excited, happy, triumphant or even cocky, but the only feeling I felt was absolute relief.